We’re in a new era of conflict and crisis. Can humanitarian aid keep up?

In the past couple of years, a sharp uptick in conflicts and crises around the world has forced an unprecedented number of people to flee their homes, straining an already underfunded global aid system.

War has ravaged countries from Sudan to Ukraine. Climate change and extreme weather have forced millions to flee for protection. Gang violence has soared in Honduras and Haiti. Radical Islamic insurgencies and clashes between communities proliferated in Burkina Faso and the Sahel.

As a result of these coalescing crises, more than 114 million people were displaced from their homes in 2023, the highest number ever recorded by the United Nations refugee agency.

Last year, more than 360 million people worldwide needed humanitarian assistance. To cover the costs of aid, the United Nations appealed to global donors — primarily governments but also philanthropic individuals and institutes— for a record $56 billion.

But even as humanitarian needs peaked, funding for aid dwindled to its lowest levels since 2019. Less than half of that $56 billion was raised. As a result, the gap between global humanitarian funding needs and donor contributions reached its highest level in more than 20 years.

And that’s not the worst part. What funding was available was not allocated equitably across the world’s crises. Conflicts in the Global South went vastly underfunded. Last week, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a major humanitarian organization, published its annual ranking of the world’s most neglected displacement crises. Nine of 10 were in Africa.

In those countries, the “utter neglect of displaced people has become the new normal,” said Jan Egeland, NRC’s secretary general.

While there is no shortage of suffering around the globe, those living in long-ignored corners of violence-wracked regions face worse challenges without the help they need. Millions of people live in total aid blindspots. Funding gaps have forced aid groups to cut food rations or prioritize communities on the verge of famine.

If major players continue to allow neglected crises to fester without sufficient funding for aid, they will continue to spiral out of control, overflowing to neighboring countries, and possibly destabilizing entire regions, causing untold human suffering.

In this year’s report, the NRC named the West African nation of Burkina Faso as home to the world’s most neglected crisis. For nearly a decade, radical Islamic insurgents  carried out attacks against civilians and military personnel. Violence escalated in 2019 when the militant group Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) carried out more attacks in Burkina Faso than in any other country in the region.

Amid unending violence, weak governance, and dismal economic opportunity, civilian self-defense groups popped up to fight the militant groups but have also turned their weapons on each other. Banditry, intercommunal violence, and deadly land disputes have ravaged the countryside in recent years.

In 2023, more than 8,000 civilians were killed, nearly 150,000 people were forced to flee to neighboring countries, and more than 2 million people were sheltering in towns blockaded by armed groups and inaccessible to aid organizations. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) calculated that $876 million was needed last year to provide an adequate humanitarian response in Burkina Faso, but only 39.4 percent of those funds were raised.

The other neglected countries that topped the NRC’s list — Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger, Honduras, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad, and Sudan, in descending order — have faced similar funding gaps. Beyond funding gaps, the NRC also defines neglected crises as those that are undercovered in the media and that lack political will from global leaders to intervene and find peaceful solutions.

For all countries except the Central African Republic, less than half of requested funds for humanitarian aid were raised last year. In Honduras, the most poorly funded country and one wracked by organized crime, gang violence, and high levels of femicide and food insecurity, only 16.5 percent of the $280 million needed for humanitarian assistance was donated.

In contrast, OCHA calculated the needs in Ukraine and Gaza in 2023 cost $3.9 billion and $376 million, respectively. In Ukraine, 72.8 percent of those funds were donated; in Gaza, 100 percent of requested funds were raised.

Of course, no one wants to compare brutalities. There is undeniable suffering in Ukraine, Gaza, and many other countries around the world, but the imbalance of funding and intervention truly exacerbates human suffering.

How exactly does UN aid funding become so imbalanced? It comes down to the way donor countries are allowed to prioritize funding for specific places or even types of aid.

Each year and in every country where the UN works, OCHA convenes all the major aid organizations to conduct a needs assessment and draw up a Humanitarian Response Plan, which outlines humanitarian assistance needed for the coming year, explained Jens Laerke, a UN OCHA spokesperson. The UN calculates the cost of that aid and then appeals to donors around the world to raise those funds.

One challenge with the current system is that donors can earmark their funds, meaning they can specify that their money must go toward certain countries or certain types of aid, such as providing food assistance. Thus, huge inequities in aid funding arise as donors decide which conflicts or crises are more important than others. The UN is at the mercy of donor priorities.

The ever-widening gap between humanitarian needs and funds leads to dire consequences for millions of people. Last year, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) had its worst funding shortfall in 60 years and was forced to cut food rations in Syria, Yemen, Haiti, and the DRC. In Sudan, where a power struggle between two military groups has caused the world’s single largest displacement crisis, mothers have resorted to feeding their children dirt and leaves. And lacking intervention, conflicts drag on and become more complex.

In Burkina Faso, the US and French governments primarily intervened by providing military and counterterrorism assistance, even though the conflict there has developed into a political and economic crisis. As such, there’s a mismatch between need and what help is being offered.

However, after two military coups took place in 2022, US agencies halted millions in badly needed aid.

As the security situation dwindled from bad to worse, the WFP had to increasingly rely on transporting food by helicopter rather than by truck, explained Elvira Pruscini, WFP’s country director in Burkina Faso. According to Pruscini, it costs $3,000 to $6,000 to move one ton of food by helicopter, compared to between $150 and $250 to move one ton of food by truck. The added expense means there is less budget to purchase food.

In protracted crises, the needs of refugees and displaced people also become more complex, explained Helene Michou, NRC’s global advocacy adviser. Providing aid to refugees for a few weeks or months means trucking in food, water, and temporary shelter until they can return home. But when conflicts go on for years, refugees can end up living in camps for decades.

At that point, aid groups have to provide longer-term aid — building sewage systems and water pipelines, providing education, helping refugees find jobs, and creating a legal framework in the host country to do that. That all comes with a hefty price tag.

“WFP is forced to make these very difficult choices about where to allocate limited resources,” Pruscini said. “We'll have to take those decisions and decide who will eat and who will not.”

Funding for the coming year looks no better for countries like Burkina Faso. As of June 11, UN OCHA has requested $934.6 million for aid for the country, and only 15.1 percent of that has been funded. What that means is that of the 2.7 million people currently in need of food aid, WFP will only be able to reach about 700,000 to 800,000 people, Pruscini said.

To close the gap, the NRC and the UN have called for countries, such as the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia that typically don’t fund much humanitarian aid, to up their giving. Michou also advocates for all donor countries to “increase humanitarian budgets with a focus on equitable financing to neglected crises or to humanitarian blind spots.”

Aid groups also need more timely and flexible funding allocations, Michou said, including funds that stretch over a few years, rather than annual allotments, and funds that are not earmarked for specific countries or activities. Laerke says that the UN has a pooled fund of non-earmarked money, and while it has grown in the past 20 years, it still falls short of the $1 billion target. The UN has started replicating this fund at the country level to have a stash of funds that can be used more flexibly as humanitarian needs change.

Finally, the UN has implemented a practice called boundary setting, which calls for aid groups to reduce their stated funding needs, focusing only on providing more immediate humanitarian needs and not stepping over the line of providing development assistance as they often must do in protracted crises. This has been controversial among aid workers; some say this causes a general underestimation of needs particularly for crises where aid cannot be easily separated from development.

When there’s only so much money to go around, it matters that global leaders consider places most in need of aid and not just the most geopolitically important countries. Lives hang in the balance.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!